Probably the most difficult task for people to do is create a tangible representation of an idea in their minds. They can record it verbally, put it down in written form or create an artistic sketch — or any other number of representations — but the final product may well turn out to be an imperfect replica of the original idea.
As difficult as this task is for the person who originated the idea, imagine how impossible it is for another person entirely to create that living, breathing interpretation — one that meets the originator’s expectations and articulates his or her overall message.
The task would challenge any of us. Yet it is one that happens every day when we content marketers take clients’ ideas and turn them into creative pieces of content meant to be digested by our clients’ target audiences.
So, how do you create content that matches someone else’s expectation?
Before I answer that question, let me first present an experiment we conducted with our creatives at CopyPress. Using the introduction above, we built out the hypothesis that, “The vaguer we are when conveying our expectations, the more apt we are to receive inconsistent results.”
Part 1:
In the first stage of our experiment, we found a photo of a Toucan sitting on a branch in a forest. We created a description of this image as best we could, without fully specifying all the elements, as we wanted to leave some room for creative interpretation. After all, we wanted to see the level of variety in the results.
We then asked nine of our creatives to “create an image of an exotic bird with a colorful beak resting on a tree branch in the rainforest.” This was descriptive enough that we should end up with similar results, but we left the “exotic bird” concept open to interpretation, to see what kind of consistency we might get in the type of bird created. The results were the following:
Even though we did not specify a “Toucan,” every designer produced an interpretation of one. The results also showed that we could still create consistency in the images without removing artistic freedom. In the artistic renderings, you can see a number of interpretations, all of them beautiful, because of the liberty we allowed in respect to color scheme, style and other design elements.
Part 2:
In the second stage of our experiment, we wanted to provide less descriptive expectations of our image, and see how accurate and consistent the results would be to that image. Our directions this time were to “create an image of two beautiful birds hanging out together.” We also directed the creatives to incorporate the color scheme of CopyPress after looking over our website.Part 2:
In the second stage of our experiment, we wanted to provide less descriptive expectations of our image, and see how accurate and consistent the results would be to that image. Our directions this time were to “create an image of two beautiful birds hanging out together.” We also directed the creatives to incorporate the color scheme of CopyPress after looking over our website.
Source; entrepreneur.com
